The Murder of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

The testimony of gendarme Sârbu before the investigative commission of the Romanian Court of Cassation in Bucharest, in November 1940, follows:

"We left Bucharest that night (November 29 to November 30) in two police vans from the police prefecture. We were accompanied by the gendarme majors, Dinulescu and Macoveanu.

Arrived in Ramnicul-Sarat we pulled in at the Gendarmerie where Majors Dinulescu and Macoveanu made contact with Major Scarlat Rosianu, of Jewish origin, commander of the Legion of Gendarmes at Ramnicul-Sarat.

Not having received a precise order, the gendarmes did not take the legionaries into custody. All of us were ordered to get back into the vans. We started back toward Bucharest. On the way, however, we were overtaken by Major Dinulescu who barked out: "Back to Ramnicul-Sarat!"

We turned around, but stopped in the village of Baltati, several kilometers this side of Ramnicul-Sarat, where we were quartered overnight. Here, we were given wine to drink, expensive cigarettes and fancy food.

Early next day we headed for Ramnicul-Sarat.

Arrived at the prison, all of us went into one of the cells where Majors Dinulescu and Macoveanu instructed us as to how we were to execute the legionaries.

Placing the driver of our van in a kneeling position, they threw a rope around his neck from behind, showing us how easily one can be thus executed.

Everything was over in a few minutes. Then the gendarmes stepped out one by one in the prison yard and each received a legionary in custody.

I got one who was stronger and taller than the others; I learned later that he was the Captain, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.

We then took them to the vans. There, the legionaries' hands were tied to the bench behind them and their legs to the lower part of the bench in front of them, in such a way that they could not move in either direction.

Ten of them were thus bound in the first van and four in the second, I was in the first van with the ten, behind the Captain; each gendarme was seated behind the legionary in his charge.

In our hands we held the ropes. Then we left.

Major Dinulescu was in my van, Major Macoveanu in the other.

A tomb-like silence was kept for we were not permitted to speak, either among ourselves or the legionaries to one another.

When we reached the Tancabesti woods, Major Dinulescu, who was to give the code signal for the moment of execution, turned his flashlight on and off three times.

This was the moment for the execution, but, I don't know why, none of us moved. Then Major Dinulescu stopped the van, got out, and went back to the one behind.

There, Major Macoveanu was more authoritative; the legionaries had already been strangled.

The Captain turned his head slightly toward me and whispered: "Comrade, permit me to talk to my comrades." But at that very moment, even before he had finished his plea, Major Dinulescu stepped onto the van's running board, and stepping inside, revolver in hand, rasped out, "Execute!"

Upon this the gendarmes threw their ropes...

The Cross in Tancabesti

With drawn curtains the vans continued on their way to Jilava.

When we got there, it was seven o'clock in the morning. There, we were expected by Colonel Zeciu; Dan Pascu, the prison's commandant; Colonel Gherovici, the legal medic; Lt.-Colonel Ionescu, and others.

The grave was already dug.

Pulled out of vans the corpses of the legionaries were then laid on the ground face down and shot in the back to thus simulate being shot while trying to escape.

Then we were gathered into a room of the Jilava prison where the colonel gave us a talk, saying: "You did your duty; you are not ordinary assassins."

Several days later I was summoned into Colonel Gherovici's office, who, seeing me, said: "You are mighty strong; you could have killed three at the same time." He then handed me a piece of paper to be signed by me, stating that I received the sum of 20,000 lei as medical help, I told him: "I am not ill, Colonel." He answered: "Listen here Sarbu! Don't you see how bad you look? And keep your mouth shut, for, if you don't, I'll fill it up with dirt," pointing to a Mauser pistol on his desk. Then I, as were the other gendarmes, was sent on furlough".

Concerning Corneliu Codreanu's death by Talmudic strangling ritual, in the intro to The Anti-Humans, Revilo Oliver points out this interesting information:

“The method of the murders was singular and remarkable. The fourteen men were taken in buses to the forest and there each of the men, who had been bound in an odd way, was strangled with a rope thrown over his head by a gendarme stationed behind him for that purpose. Then, to give some color to the official story that Codreanu and his ranking Legionaries had been “killed while trying to escape,” each corpse was shot in the back several times before it was thrown into the waiting grave. Prince Sturdza, in the Romanian text of his memoirs (Madrid, 1966; pp. 133 f.), asks the inevitable question: “Let us ask ourselves why there was that resort to strangulation, a procedure that was awkward and contraindicated in the circumstances, instead of a bullet in the back of the head, the simple and usual method and the obvious one to have used, since an hour later, to simulate an escape, the lifeless bodies were riddled with bullets.” (There is the further consideration that the bullet, unlike strangulation, would not have left the marks that were detected by autopsy when, after the flight of Carol, the bodies were exhumed and the officers who had carried out the murders under orders testified what they had done). Prince Sturdza then points out that the elaborate and peculiar way in which the victims were strangled corresponds in every detail to the method by which Jews are instructed to kill their enemies in a passage of the Talmud that he quotes (p. 134). Needless to say, this part of Prince Sturdza’s book, like many others, was omitted in the heavily censored English translation cited in our footnote below.”

"We were born in the mist of time on this land together with the oaks and fir trees. We are bound to it not only by the bread and existence it furnishes us as we toil on it, but also by all the bones of our ancestors who sleep in its ground. All our parents are here. All our memories, all our war-like glory, all our history here, in this land lies buried. Here… sleep the Romanians fallen there in battles, nobles and peasants, as numerous as the leaves and blades of grass. At Posada, Calugareni, on the Olt, jiu and Cerna rivers, at Turda; in the mountains of the unhappy and forgotten Moti of Vidra, all the way to Huedin and Alba-Iulia (the torture place of Horia and his brothers-in-arms), there are everywhere testimonies of battles and tombs of heroes. All over the Carpathians, from the Oltenian mountains at Dragoslavele and at Predeal, from Oituz to Vatra Dornei, on peaks and in valley bottoms, everywhere Romanian blood flowed like rivers. In the middle of the night, in difficult times for our people, we hear the call of the Romanian soil urging us to battle. I ask and I expect an answer: By what right do the Jews wish to take this land from us? On what historical argument do they base their pretensions and particularly the audacity with which they defy us Romanians, here in our own land? We are bound to this land by millions of tombs and millions of unseen threads that only our soul feels, and woe to those who shall try to snatch us from it."

-Corneliu Codreanu